I disagree - the social effects of Web 2.0 justify the use of the term; and I fully admit that new technologies played an inferior role for Web 2.0 compared to the social developments that shaped the world online.

from what i can see web2.0 is all about creating user generated content i.e. forums, blogs videos, photos and music all mashed up in various combinations.

The challenge is to make a site where its members promote it for you, that way it can experience a short period of almost expontential growth.

Then you wait for a google or a yahoo to offer you a billion dollars and hey presto! If that doesn't happen then they just start selling advertising, with the huge number of page impressions they get even a low price CPM can be amazingly lucrative.

Partly, but mostly Google is just search 2.0 (with altavista being search 1.0).

> web 2.0

Refers to the migration of posting and participation from Usenet to the Web after Usenet was all but spammed out of existence.

Lets look at it in historical context. If you want to know what direction you are headed in, look at where you have been.

Follow the progression:

- Swap Meets (computer flea markets of the mid 70's). They were social events.

- Computer Clubs of the mid to late 70's- Sunday Night Computer Clubs and the famous Homebrew Computer Club. These were huge social events that inspired geeks and fueled the passion for computer. That social passion peaked with the founding of Apple.

- BBS's of the 80's. Although there were alot of warez traded, the glue was the subboards (we now call forums). Once packet exchanges became common place in the late 80's - discussion counts skyrocketed.

- Usenet (late 80's onward). As access points increased in the late 80's, and modems breeched the 9600 barrier, group counts doubled in a years time as Usenet collided with the ever expanding Internet.

- Late 90's saw the confluence of events and technology. : -- the web took off and the browser became the defacto software platform. -- computers were finally powerful enough to handle an abusive high cpu, high bandwidth, and multiuser environment that forums require. -- thus bbs software was developed for the web (forums). -- Usenet became a commercialized spammers paradise and the quality of information in most groups plummeted. -- The result? Forums began to flourish about 1998-1999. -- Groups that bound people began to die on Usenet, and those displaced users looked to the web to find their niche. -- CSS takes off and kids like drop shadows. -- Microsoft delivers it's first stable operation system (XP) since DOS 3.2 (1984). People have more time to surf the web in search of their passions - instead of search the web for fixes for their broken OS. (How many hours did you spend hunting down drivers, and fixes for windows 9.x?) -- User participation + CSS 2 + XP = Web 2.0

Where is it going. A genius once told me to "follow the life cycle of a human being and you will know what business you should be in right now, next year, and 10 years from now". He was right. Follow the baby boomers:

- 80's (they started to turn 30 and body parts started to head south). Businesses in the 80's that saw huge growth were exercise equipment, health clubs, beauty products, baby products, and other 30 year old "must haves". - 90's they turned 40 and started to play the stock market with some of the cash they saved up in the 80's. We know what the market did in the 90's. - 00's hedge funds - long term planning - savings - mutual funds - trips abroad - cruises... all things those in the 50's love. - 10's? What do retiree's want and need?

Repeat that process with the web and you can get an idea of where it it going and where Web 3.0 will be a couple years from now.